FDM

It's a strange new site. What content will go here? Only time will tell.

First, some commentary on actual play of the most recent edition of D&D.

Initially I had great fears that each class would feel very much the same in play. The consistent grouping of at-will, encounter and daily seemed to me to be making one meta-class that everyone belongs to.

I could not have been more wrong. What happens in play is this: though the mechanics of power use are consistent, each class has cause to use its powers at different intervals. The nature of the abilities themselves directs the player in their use; the only way the classes would play the same is if they all had equivalent abilities to one another. And this is not the case.

In the prior edition, there was a great desire on my part to play wizards and clerics. Not through any desire to power game (I am only a power gamer on a very low level and always stuck to the three core books) but because they had a variety of interesting things to do. I do realize that this was an intentional design goal in earlier editions. The fighter was what you picked your first time; as time went on you would branch out and learn. This concept is gone now but I have to say I like what has come in its place. The complexity of the spellcasters has gone down but the complexity of the other classes has definitely gone up. I like it. I can see others not liking it, though.

The changes to DMing are a god send to me. I never really liked CR as it seemed the math was more complicated than it needed to be. And the bucketfulls of magic items the characters gathered were hard to manage. The new system is simple. It does trade the esoteric charm of earlier editions (the ones earlier than third were less magic item intensive, though) for simplicity. But it does allow you to more easily prevent magic items from becoming part of some great economy.

More later.